Tasting Notes Competition

A thread initiated by doubleblank and mightily fleshed out by Gillman and others deals with tasting notes by Jim Murray and others.

In one post Gary wrote:

Personally I find a detailed description based on simile or metaphor referring to the tastes or odors of other drinks, or of foods or other objects, informative to learn what a drink might taste like. This approach is better than formulas such as "rich and full" or "dark-tasting" which do not tell anything about the actual flavor of a product.

Wouldn't it be fun to have a competition among professional tasters? Form a small panel of them. Have each one taste a small number of bourbons, say five, and then compose tasting notes extemporaneously. Then present a sample of each bourbon and all of the tasting notes to a panel of SB.com luminaries -- folks who have been around the bar, er ... ah ..., make that "block" a few times. They each try to identify which bourbon goes with which set of tasting notes.

I'm sure there are some rough edges in this concept, but I bet y'all could work it out, perhaps at some gathering in Kentucky sometime in late summer.

The exercise he suggests may or may not be instructive but the fact remains that the taste notes of the good writers help people a lot. That is why those writers sell a lot of books including Murray and Jackson.

Some time back I tasted a whisky, Strathisla, with a friend. It is a Scots single malt. This person likes whisky but he does not like to describe it and is bemused by the expressive vocabulary of some whisky fans, all of whom (one way or another) have been influenced by wine journalism. He said "it's interesting but I can't describe it." I said to him, in one of his books Jackson said the taste of Strathisla reminded him of the taste of the small wooden spoon that used to come with little tubs of ice cream he ate as a kid. And my friend said, "that's it, exactly, that's exactly right!".

I have found Jackson a near-faultless guide, myself. My eureka moment was when he identified the thing I always found puzzling or odd about rye whiskey and (I later realised) high rye-recipe bourbon. This was that it tastes like mint or peppermint and serves to balance and counterpoint the sweet flavours derived from vanillin and esters.

With all respect to the people in the industry who do this work, I am not sure what the formal qualifications are or should be for "professional" tasting. I believe Chuck in his book states, quite understandably, that the main criterion is to taste consistently a range of bourbons so as to be able to form a good opinion of them. I think professional tasters are both made and born in the sense that the good ones combine personal experience and judgment with industry knowledge and any formal training they have in sensory analysis and so forth. Applying the core standard of experience, many here are good tasters - and we saw at that informal tasting at Bettye Jo's last year that not all are born equal. I do not know who really decides at most distilleries what should be released and in which market. Since I like bourbons from all the distilleries, I think they are all doing a fine job. I particularly admire the work of Elmer T. Lee.

I have a BBQ at my home for the people I work with, several of whom are Bourbon drinkers. We are going to do a 4 bottle tasting and for part of that we are using the distillers/advertisers notes on how they percieve the contents of the bottle. The format we are following is to first just vote on the un-opened bottle, out of respect for those marketing people; what bottle makes us want to open it more than the others. Then we will go through a blind taste, and take our own notes. When we are done with that, we will get the distillers/advertisers notes, and try to match them up with the glasses we have.
The person that matches the most will win a little prize.
The bottle that is picked as the favorite will move on to face another 3 at the next BBQ in June.
If we cant find distiller/advertiser comments I am going to copy some of the notes from SB.com folks to use as my experts! Some of you "Disciples and Gurus" will be my experts without even knowing it!
In the end this is just set up as a fun get together, and a chance to try some good Bourbons.

Obviously, when I wrote what I wrote, I did not, in any sense refer to someone like Elmer.

My contact with master distillers has been limited to the interviews in Chuck's video/DVD, "Made and Bottled in Kentucky", and other interviews that have appeared in print and on the web. However, I've been exposed to a fair sample of their views in regard to tasting, and I've yet to hear/see any of them refer to "a hint of coriander peeking out from behind a wisp of lavender" or a "backbone" of this-or-that. After all, their job is to craft bourbon that people want to drink, not descriptions that people want to read.

Accordingly, I would hope that the expert panel could be drawn from taster/writers, not taster/distillers. I think it would be much more fun that way.

A Brief Excursion to a Different Topic

The title of this post is a euphemism I use when I hijack my own thread.

You are right; there is a minimum number of characters (10) for a post. I just now went to the test forum to check it out. IIRC, this came up during testing of the new software. As easy as it is to add a few characters, I think Jim decided to leave it alone.

Seriously, during the test phase there was also minimum number of characters for keywords in the search function. I recall trying to search for "rye", "old" and "dad" (as in "Old Grand Dad), only to be informed that I had not provided a valid search parameter. Jim fixed that one.

Being a person to whom economical expression is all but unknown, I have no problem with a minimum requirement.